Secure Virtual Workspaces for Business Continuity

Emergency Remote Solution to Mitigate Covid-19 Disruption Risk, Ready in 5 days on Azure. Preparing and building a cloud-based business continuity solution doesn’t have to break budgets.

The Risk

The Harvard Business Review in its February 2020 issue warned senior executives of enterprises of all sizes, that one risk their organizations will potentially face is the need to continue operations when the majority of employees will not be able to come to work due to emergencies, quarantines, or illnesses caused by Covid-19.

For knowledge workers, access to company applications, systems, file shares and information is critical to their ability to be productive. Specifically, for professional organizations, this is even more critical; as much of this information is secured behind firewalls on the enterprises’ internal network. During normal and expected operations, most firms currently provide secure access to road warriors and other mobile users through some combination of virtual private network access, company-owned and secured laptops, and virtual desktop infrastructure — all to provide controlled access to internal systems and data.

The Challenge

Most organizations, however, do not have the Virtual Private Network capacity, in-house Virtual Desktop server capacity, and company-owned and protected laptop inventory to operate effectively when over 90% of their billable employees are required to work from home on a full-time basis. Investing in owning 100% redundant capability is financially prohibitive and is unnecessary where the industry average daily percentage of out-of-the-office workforce is typically under 25%.

The need for the Secure Virtual Workspace is real and accelerating with the likelihood of a global pandemic:

• In mid-February Nippon Telephone and Telegraph (NTT), the Japanese telecommunications firm made headlines after asking 200,000 of its nearly 300,000-strong workforces to start either working from home or using staggered hours, to help prevent COVID-19 infections.
• JPMorgan Chase is asking 10% of its consumer bank staff to work from home as part of a test for the bank's coronavirus contingency plan, according to a report by Bloomberg. The plan, code-named "Project Kennedy" according to the report, is part of preparation for a scenario in which the bank closes its US offices because of a further coronavirus spread.

The Secure Cloud virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) Solution

OpStack Inc. and select partners have developed a quickly deployable, secure, and scalable solution that delivers a secure environment configured to meet your organization’s needs to access internal systems and information — and do so in conformance with your policies. The solution will enable you to quickly scale-up and scale-down any number of users to work remotely.

For professional organizations, the Azure cloud provides an opportunity to activate secure networks and compute capability on-demand to augment their existing networks. However, spinning up secure cloud environments can be challenging. IT Directors and Technology Chairs need to consider encryption, image management, patching and lock down while administering the complexity of deploying and maintaining a cloud environment. All of these elements are an automated component of the solution.

Because this a virtual desktop (VDI) solution, your employees can connect using any computer they have available without taking the risk of connecting unmanaged machines to your network or putting your data on those devices.

No retraining of your personnel is required — the on-demand workspace is connected to your existing IT resources (e.g. Exchange, Business Applications, Sharepoint, Office etc) allowing your people to work as if they were in the office. Engineering a custom solution would be complex and expensive, but it doesn’t have to be and that’s why we have launched Secure Virtual Workspace on Azure.

The cost is minimal when compared to either the lost time and opportunities associated with facility closings or with building permanent VDI solutions.